A Brief History of Narcocorridos

The news reported it like this. In an upscale neighborhood in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Atanacio Torres Acosta was responding to an alleged car accident involving a family member. When he arrived at the site of the incident, a group of sicarios drove up and unloaded their AK-47’s, killing him and injuring his sister-in-law and 4-year old sister. Atanacio, a.k.a. “El M4”, was the son of Manuel Torres Felix, “El M1”, a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel. What happened next was barely covered by the news, and yet it’s common knowledge, thanks to narcocorridos.

The assassination was the result of a rivalry between M1 and the Beltrán Leyva Cartel. The death of his son sent M1 into a killing spree earning him the nickname “El Ondeado”, the Crazy One. A month after the killing two dead bodies appeared on the same spot. A sign next to the bodies identified them as Atanacio’s killers and as child killers (even though the 4 year-old sister had survived), a warning not to mess with children. The reporting in “La Venganza del M1”, a narcocorrido by Dinastia Norteña tells the story (all song lyrics translated).

My vice is enemy blood
Vengeance is my pleasure
There will be tortures, there will be hell
…
4 was brave, my son
Was killed by some cowards
They were afraid to meet me
…
With one foot I pressed against his chest
With one hand I grabbed his hair
In the other hand, a knife
I decapitate him, I cut their necks
And I leave next to him a message
To children, you show respect

You may have heard or read about narcocorridos in the past few years. Since Mexican President Calderón decided to turn the drug war up to eleven in 2006, violence in Mexico has exploded, and with it so has the relevance and interest in narcocorridos, which often glorify the narco lifestyle and violence. While the genre has existed long before 2006, the widespread use of social media has helped the genre’s enormous popularity. In 1989, Chalino Sánchez sold his self-recorded cassette tapes out of the trunk of his car. In 2018, Gerardo Ortiz, who has 3.5 million Twitter followers and another 3 million YouTube subscribers, has a hit single “Dámaso” with 260 million YouTube views. Today, narcocorridos are probably the most popular music genre in the US and Mexico most Americans have never heard of.

Narcocorridos are corridos about narcos and a corrido is a Mexican folk ballad, often about political issues or important historical events. Corridos have a long history in Mexico, starting from the Mexican War of Independence in 1810 and throughout the Mexican Revolution (1910–1921). Long before narco trafficking, contraband, and smuggling, the ballads usually told stories about government oppression, often carrying hidden political messages as was common during the revolution. You’ve probably heard one of these corridos before.

Some of the first ballads about smuggling appeared in the late 19th century, when the government of president Porfirio Diaz imposed tariffs on fine textiles making the smuggling of textiles from the US into Mexico a very lucrative business. One of the most famous textile smugglers was Mariano Resendez, the subject of one of the first ballads about contraband. Resendez, like the subjects of many corridos, was considered a hero among the communities in Northern Mexico because of his resistance to government forces. In fact, drug lore is full of such characters. Most famous of which is Jesus Malverde, angel of the poor, patron saint of the narcos, and subject of many narcocorridos.

Although his existence is not verified, Malverde, who lived in the late 19th century, was most likely not a drug smuggler since marijuana and opiates were not illegal during his time (it wasn’t until 1920 and 1925 that Mexico prohibited the sale and use of marijuana and opiates, respectively). To this day, Malverde is considered to be a Mexican Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. This important trope would remain a significant part of narcocorridos for many decades.

It wasn’t until the 1920’s with the enactment of the 18th Amendment and the subsequent Volstead Act that smuggling really took off. Smugglers known as Tequileros would push rafts full of — you guessed it — Tequila across the Rio Grande and would drive trucks through the desert to smuggle it into the US. Corridos at the time also combined smuggling with social issues. As “El Corrido de los Bootleggers” demonstrates, the dire conditions in some parts of Mexico sometimes left people with no other choice but to resort to smuggling.

I started thinking, gentlemen
There is no more work
I have to find my life
If the Lord would grant me

When prohibition ended in 1933, the Tequileros suddenly found themselves out of a job and turned to other controlled substances. Drug smuggling took off shortly afterwards and with that came the first drug ballads. One of the first narcocorrido is said to have been “El Contrabandista” written by Juan Gaytán of the “Gaytán y Cantú” band. It perfectly illustrates the shift in the smuggling business.

I began selling champagne, tequila, and Havana wine,
But I did not know what a prisoner suffers.
Soon I bought an automobile, property with a house,
Without knowing that in a short time I would be going to jail.
For selling cocaine, morphine, and marijuana,
They took me prisoner at two in the morning.

After the initial appearance of drug ballads, there seems to be no major developments between the 1950’s and 1960’s in the narcocorrido space. This could have been due to the economic prosperity Mexico enjoyed during these decades. The resurgence of narcocorridos seems to coincide with the social and economic trouble that enveloped the country at the end of the 1960’s. Another major factor for their resurgence could have been the increase in marijuana consumption in the US during the 1960’s or the increase in heroin traffic due to the collapse of its market in Europe and the Middle East. Whatever it was, the definite turning point for narcocorridos came in 1972 when a song about a now very famous Texan hit the airwaves. The song, by norteño band from Northern California, would mean the rebirth of a genre that would grow to reach millions of listeners on both sides of the border.

Ángel González wrote “Contrabando y Traición” in the mid 60’s and in 1972, the young California band, Los Tigres del Norte, recorded it into song. The story begins with Camelia “La Texana” travelling north from San Ysidro to Los Angeles with her partner Emilio Varela, their car tires full of marijuana. Upon arriving to Hollywood and finalizing the drug deal, Emilio Varela tells Camelia he is leaving her for another woman in San Francisco. This doesn’t sit well with Camelia who then decides to shoot Emilio and take off with the money. She is never heard from again. Up until then, most of the corridos had been about real events, but González had completely made up the story of Camelia. In writing a fictional song, González set the genre on a new path. Soon after the song’s widespread success, hundreds of writers tried to replicate the formula and it took the popularity of narcocorridos to new heights.

In an interview by author Elijah Wald, González tells how after 30 years he has not been able to come to terms with the song’s enormous popularity and the countless of corridistas it inspired. “That song, I wrote it without thinking, I had no idea what would happen afterward. After my corrido, along came that whole pile of songs about drug traffickers, but I wrote it without any idea of that. It was a problem I brought to light, but not something I knew much about […] I never, never ever thought that the song would make it big.” While it seems like González had a strong moral stance against drug smuggling, it is not clear that the rest of the corridistas and their fans shared the same ideals.

Researcher, Juan Carlos Ramirez-Pimienta says drug trafficking was seen almost as a patriotic duty since it was bringing large quantities of money into Mexico. The economic benefits of the drug trade are of course exaggerated, he says, but it’s not difficult to see how in the minds of a lot of people, drug trafficking was not all that bad, especially during Mexico’s troubled economy. What’s more, the cartels would often give out “narcolimosnas”, or narco-charity to win over the public’s opinion. It’s almost too obvious that the major drug lords would engage in the same type of generosity as popular legends like Jesús Malverde.

With or without moral justification, the genre exploded and corridos underwent several transformations. The songs shifted from portraying the protagonist as someone who just smuggled drugs into someone who reaped and enjoyed the riches it brought. The smuggler was now someone who consumed drugs and not just smuggled them, someone who enjoyed the lifestyle, someone who through their own brawn rather than their brain rose up from poverty to achieve great success in the form of riches and power. Researcher Helena Simonnet says:

“The changing social reality of Mexico’s Northwest also affected popular music, notably the corrido production. Although the image of the brave man that was generated by the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century still holds for the protagonists of the contemporary corridos, the meaning of bravery has changed. While the heroes of the folk corridos raised their arms for social justice and equality, the tough guys of the narcocorridos carry their weapons for personal enrichment and empowerment.”

Mexican authorities, out of fear that these songs would act as recruitment strategies for the cartels, began cracking down and in some places banned these songs from the airwaves. This never proved fruitful since much of the audience resided in the US where freedom of speech laws protected the corridos from any sort of censorship. Since radio waves have little regard for our national boundaries, people who lived along the border on the Mexican side could still tune in to American radio stations. Censorship even proved advantageous to bands such as Los Tigres del Norte who capitalized on prohibition by marketing their albums as “forbidden”. Despite relatively low airplay in Mexico, their best-selling album “Corridos Prohibidos” (Forbidden Corridos) was hugely successful even though there was nothing “forbidden” about their songs, especially not in the US. Their strategy proved so successful that many other bands followed suit like Los Tucanes de Tijuana’s “Tucanes de Plata: Catorce Tucanes Censurados”.

As the popularity and demand for narcocorridos raged on in the early nineties, a new phenomenon began to take hold of Los Angeles nightclubs. Many capos having heard many commercial narcocorridos about the most famous drug lords decided they wanted to be protagonists of their own corridos, so they started commissioning their own.

Among the most influential commissioned-corridistas was Rosalino “Chalino” Sánchez. As the story goes, Chalino was born in 1960 in rural Sinaloa. When he was five years old, a local tough guy raped his sister. Ten years later, Chalino ran into him at a party and without saying a word walked up to him and shot him dead. Soon afterward he fled Sinaloa and moved to LA to live with his aunt. In LA he would work several jobs including low-level smuggling which would connect him to the narco-world. In 1984, his brother, Armando, was shot and killed in Tijuana and Chalino would write his first narcocorrido to preserve his memory. Soon afterward he found himself serving jail time where he would write songs about his fellow inmates in exchange for money or favors. Word spread of his writing talents and after his release he found himself in high demand among low-level narcos who would pay him cash to produce cassettes with songs about them. While still a relatively local phenomenon in southern California, his big publicity break came in early 1992 when, while singing at a club in Coachella, someone came up to the stage and shot Chalino on his side. Chalino pulled out his gun and shot back. By the end of the shootout, the would-be assassin would end up dead, shot in the mouth with his own pistol. News coverage of the shooting made him a sensation on both sides of the border. Months later, Chalino’s luck ran out when after a concert in Culiacán he was killed after being picked up by a group of armed men. He became the Mexican version of Tupac Shakur. Chalino’s death elevated him to legendary status. Hundreds of songs were written about him and soon the narcocorrido genre was flooded with Chalino imitators.

The narcocorrido trend continued throughout the nineties and through the early aughts, until the start Calderón’s drug war transformed narcocorridos once again, this time into hyper-violent songs like “La Venganza del M1”. The new sub-genre is called movimiento alterado, or altered movement. The songs not only tell about the lavish lifestyle of cartel members, but also include gory details of narco killings.

The current drug war also changed the landscape for narcocorrido singer-songwriters. No longer just in song, violence came to them in a very real way. Chalino Sánchez might have been the first in a long list of ill-fated corridistas. Singing about the narcotrafficking world turned out to be an extremely dangerous profession. In the period between 2006 and 2010, I was able to list 29 murdered narcocorrido singers and band-members. In the same period, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 38 journalists were killed. In Mexico, being a narcocorrido singer, is almost as dangerous as being a journalist.

Narcocorridos are easy to dismiss. Perhaps this is why they occupy a (very large) niche fan base. Not a lot of people can stomach the violence (and the misogyny, the homophobia, etc) in song and in real life. But from telling the story of the Sinaloa and Beltrán Leyva Cartel rivalry, to the story of the poor out-of-work farmer who had to resort to a life of crime, narcocorridos are a significant cultural artifact of the last 100 years. They are complicated and shallow, deplorable and worthwhile, uninteresting and fascinating, imaginative and trite. They are a major part of a culture comprised of millions of people, Mexicans and Americans, and they can’t be dismissed as merely “songs about violence” because like them or not, they are here to stay.

Ramirez-Pimienta, Juan Carlos. 2004. “Del Corrido De Narcotráfico Al Narcocorrido: Orígnes y Desarrollo Del Canto a Los Traficantes.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 23: 21–41.

— — — . 2013. “De Torturaciones, Balas y Explosiones: Narcocultura, Movimiento Alterado e Hiperrealismo En El Sexenio de Felipe Calderón.” A Contra Corriente 10 (3): 302–34.

Schwarz, Saul. 2013. Narco Cultura. Ocean Size Pictures.

Simonett, Helena. 2001. “Narcocorridos: An Emerging Micromusic of Nuevo L. A.” Ethnomusicology 45 (2): 315–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/852677 .

Wald, Elijah. 2001. Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas. 1st ed. Rayo.